A consideration of publication-derived immune-related associations in Coronavirus and related lung damaging diseases

Nophar Geifman; Anthony D Whetton

A complete description of the approach taken by this study can be found in [11] . Briefly, a list of cytokine MeSH descriptors (such as "interferon gamma," "transforming growth factor beta," and "chemokine CCL3") was manually compiled by a domain expert, who browsed MeSH's sub-trees and selected those descriptors that were deemed relevant to this work. Similarly, a list of immune-related cell type MeSH descriptors (such as "lymphocytes," "Th1 cells," and "basophils") was also compiled (see Supplementary File 1). A comprehensive list of disease names and synonyms was extracted from the Human Disease Ontology. This approach to capturing associations between disease, cytokines and different cell types had been extensively evaluated, as described in [11] . For each PubMed abstract (see below) the associated MeSH descriptors were recorded, and the lists of cytokine names, cell types, and diseases were searched for exact matches.